Quality of service (QoS) is an important aspect of wireless data system performance. Characteristics such as transmission rates and error rates are indicators of the QoS provided to individual users. Better QoS can generally be achieved for each user when the system is experiencing a lighter load because there is less contention for shared resources such as power, hardware, spreading codes, etc. During periods of heavy loads, however, the system may need to sacrifice the QoS provided to its users in order to increase overall system performance in terms of throughput and efficiency.
In order to ensure that each user is offered the highest possible QoS, a wireless data system may employ conventional resource management and scheduling algorithms to automatically adjust the resources allocated to each user based on a current level of contention and/or user fairness criteria. However, when the load decreases to a certain point, such algorithms are no longer able to adjust the allocation of system resources in order to improve user QoS.